David Irving:
Self-Made Historian

by Frank Miele

IF David Irving were an
American baseball fan, he would turn off
the sound on the TV because he could not
stand the announcers, and he would read
the box scores every morning without even
looking at the AP wire, let alone the big
name columnists. When he decided to become
fluent in German, he did not take German
101 or order "learn-a-language" tapes; he
spent two years as a steel worker in
Germany.

Irving goes about writing history in
the same do-it-yourself manner. He has no
formal academic training in history. In
fact, he holds most academic historians in
contempt. While they spend their time
reading each others' books, Irving avoids
secondary and interpretive sources and
instead immerses himself in the archives,
going through diaries, correspondence,
handwritten notes of the person he's
writing about, his staff and
intimates.

Irving has written or is in the process
of writing a book on most of the major
figures of World War II. When I reached
him for a series of telephone interviews
he was going over the final draft of
Dr.
Goebbels.

Irving's method of relying on only
primary sources gives his books a unique
style and a very controversial impact.
Some are more in the form of a chronology
than an interpretive summary. They often
read more like Joe Friday than
Gibbon or Macaulay. And like
a police report, they contain firsthand
information you will find nowhere else,
which is why they have been required
reading at such places as West Point, the
Army War College at Carlisle,
Pennsylvania, the British Open University,
and the Royal Institute of International
Affairs.

Critics would argue that Irving's
methodology is not only his strength, but
his greatest weakness. The mildest
criticism would be that in his avoidance
of secondary and interpretive sources, his
reader loses any sense of context and is
unable to see the forest for all the
(unearthed) trees.

A stronger criticism would be that
after providing a mass of details, Irving
seizes upon some "zinger" as support for
some controversial thesis and thereby
guarantees publicity and sales. When I
asked Irving if he thought this criticism
had any merit, he answered that if he
discovers "zingers as you call them," he
documents them and follows the evidence
wherever it leads him; he does not
manufacture them. He also told me that
certain forms of controversy hurt sales
and result in costly litigation.

The strongest criticism would be that
Irving uses whatever he can find in the
mass of documents to support his own "mild
fascist" position. In 1979 he argued in
Hitler's
War that not only was there no
evidence of a Führer order for the
extermination of the Jews, but that Hitler
himself did not know what was going on
with respect to the Jews (at least in the
beginning). Since then his conclusions
have consistently moved in a revisionist
direction that reduces the culpability
assigned to Germany in general and Hitler
in particular, both for starting the war
and practicing genocide.

Irving told me that the oft-repeated
characterization of him as a
"self-described mild
Fascist" was neither fair nor accurate
and was based on a 1959
article that was "retracted
immediately." He prefers to describe
himself as an "ultraconservative with
socialist leanings." As for reducing Nazi
culpability, Irving stated that he has
publicly accepted every Nazi atrocity or
crime for which he can find hard
evidence.

Controversy and litigation are no
strangers to Irving. But it was only after
his testimony
in the Zündel trial that governments
placed criminal charges against him, that
he was deported or denied entry, and that
his books were removed from stores and/or
the stores vandalized. He told me he
realized that there was "a campaign to
shut me up" and that he "was up against an
international organization with
considerable clout." I asked him to
identify the organization, which he did as
"the
traditional enemies of the truth."

In May, 1992, Irving told a German
audience that the gas chamber shown to
tourists at Auschwitz
was "a fake built after the war." In June,
1992, he was coming to Rome from Moscow.
When the plane landed, it was surrounded
by police and Irving was put on the next
plane to Munich. He was charged under the
German law of "defaming the memory of the
dead" and fined
3,000DM. He appealed the conviction
and on subsequent appeals the conviction
was upheld and the fine increased first to
10,000 and then to 30,000DM, or about
$20,000. (The German legal system provides
for increasing the penalty on appeal.
Irving was not the victim of extralegal
tactics, nor has he ever claimed this). In
all his appeals, Irving was not allowed to
call the director of the Auschwitz museum
as a witness to confirm his statement.
(The Auschwitz gas chamber is, in fact, a
reconstruction built after the war. No one
at the Auschwitz museum denies this.)

Later that year, while in California,
Irving received a
letter from the Canadian government
saying that he would not be allowed into
that country because of the German
conviction. He did enter Canada, legally,
in October, 1992, to receive the George
Orwell award from a conservative free
speech organization. He was arrested by
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, led
away in handcuffs and told that he was
being deported on the grounds that he had
been convicted of a criminal offense in
Germany and was likely to perform similar
acts in Canada. According to Irving, he
had been to the country numerous times
before without even a traffic ticket.

At present he cannot legally enter
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Italy,
Germany, or South Africa. When he is
allowed into certain countries, the
authorities sometimes present Irving with
a list of just what it is he is not
allowed to say. The list can sometimes run
12-15 pages.

Irving feels he has also suffered
professionally because of his revisionist
views. Waterstones and Dillon's (British
book chains) decided to keep Irving's
books out of view after a number of their
stores had been vandalized (Brownlee,
1992). The German Federal Archives in
Coblenz, to which Irving has donated one
ton of materials, has denied him further
access and he is demanding the return of
his materials. In March of 1994, Macmillan,
the American publisher of Irving's
forthcoming book on Dr. Goebbels, rejected
his final draft and demanded the return of
his (sizable) advance.

Irving's current position is that no
one has offered proof (or now even tries)
to contradict his argument that there was
no "Führer order;" that the total
number of Jewish deaths should be reduced
to a figure below one million; that the
Leuchter
Report is firm evidence against the
existence of gas chambers which has been
independently confirmed; and that the
number of gassings that may have taken
place in mobile vans or other experimental
devices was at most an insignificant
percentage of the total deaths.

Having grown up in a mob town in New
Jersey, I asked Irving why one would even
hope to find a written order, as such
things usually take the form of verbal
commands: "Hey Vito, can you take care of
that thing for me?" Irving agreed that the
"Godfather" method might well have been
the way it happened.

I suggested to Irving that Hitler's
declaration of war on the United States on
December 10, 1941, was evidence that der
Führer realized he would either win
the war and have the history books written
the way he wanted, or lose completely, in
which case he would take as many of his
enemies with him as he could. Given this
mindset, he probably encouraged Himmler
to "take care of that Jewish thing."
Irving responded that such an
interpretation did not contradict the
evidence and may well have been what
happened. While going through the
Goebbels
diaries he found that from about 1942
on Goebbels repeatedly said things like
"We have crimes on our book. We can't go
back. We can only go forward." I quoted
Shakespeare's murderous Richard III (Act
IV, scene ii), "I am so far in blood that
sin will pluck on sin. Tear-falling pity
dwells not in this eye," which Irving
thought fit quite well.

My conversations with Irving were quite
different from those with either
Zündel or Mark Weber. Where
Zündel struck me as a supersalesman
looking for a way to close, and Weber
seemed like a therapist trying to help me
get over denial, Irving came across as the
polished professional, with immediate
recall of a wealth of facts and figures
and little concern whether I agreed with
him or not. This difference became even
more obvious when I asked Irving: "suppose
the revisionists are proven correct, what
would change?" He responded, "the press
would immediately say, 'we knew it all
along.'" He then read his "Note for the
Record," which he asks all journalists to
sign before interviewing him on the
Holocaust:

Being a responsible journalist
reporting for _______, I solemnly
affirm that I still believe in the
existence during World War Two of "gas
chambers" and "factories of death" in
which Nazis killed millions of their
opponents. Signed______ Print
Name______ Date______ _Alternatively_:
signature declined, (signed)______

(Since I am acting as a journalist for
Skeptic, here is how I responded to
Irving's note: "I neither affirm your note
as provided, nor decline to participate.
Here's what, based on reading and
interviews, including you and
revisionists, I presently think: Millions
of Jews died in Europe under the Nazis.
Some died of disease, overwork, brutality
in the camps. Some were shot on the spot
by Einsatzgruppen and Nazi collaborators.
Some were systematically killed in the
camps by methods that included gassing.
I've found no 'hard' percentages. I'll
continue to believe this until and unless
you or someone else can convince me
otherwise." Irving told me that I was the
second person to provide an alternative
version. All others had simply declined.
None had signed.)

When I asked Irving what he would do if
proven wrong, he again offered a
professional and unemotional reply. He
said he'd move on to something else,
satisfied that he had argued the case
well.

Where revisionism is a crusade for
Zündel, for Irving it seems more an
intellectual battle royal. And when it's
done and over, he believes he'll be the
last one standing and will take particular
delight in stepping over the bodies of the
academics he has KO'd along the way.

Intellectually, Irving's extremely
proud. He told me how, when he was
imprisoned in England for contempt of
court arising out of a libel action
brought by Australian Jewish
organizations, his fellow prisoners,
especially blacks, treated him with
respect and dignity. Irving is miffed that
John Charmley is getting the credit
for the current wave of Churchill
revisionism going on in Britain, when it
was he (Irving) who started it all. He's
even more miffed that Vladimir
Zhirinovsky has taken Irving's place
as the star speaker at right-wing
talkfests put on by the German publisher
Gerhard Frey. He considers
Zhirinovsky an unstable lightweight who'll
never be taken seriously, and feels Frey
has wasted his money bankrolling
Zhirinovsky's political campaign.

Irving enjoys taking chances and
defending controversial positions for the
intellectual challenge. He doesn't like to
be labeled or pigeon-holed. He's currently
working on a book on FDR, whom he
found to be an exceptionally capable war
time leader who listened to his generals,
lost relatively few lives, "took us
(Brits) for all we had," and made the U.S.
a great power. He considers America's
subsequent wars (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and
Panama) to have been counterproductive and
racist and thinks the American media have
done a terrible job of presenting the
story to us. After likening the Gulf War
to the Holocaust, in October, 1991, he was
thrown out of an Argentine TV studio and
all his lectures in that country were
cancelled.

The
above news item is reproduced without editing other
than typographical; it does contain some
unimportant misstatements of fact